


The Best Part of Faith

by musamihi



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 01:45:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the grip of fever, Grantaire attempts to explain himself – and succeeds, through no fault of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best Part of Faith

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a line from the prompt's 'I See You,' by Mika ([youtube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OM8hvyOKMc%20)) - _why go risking the way I see you?_

A gust of wind flew off the river and made an eddy of dry leaves in the mouth of the Rue St. Jacques; the distant, tattered clouds blew apart just long enough to let the sun strike out once more before it set. Grantaire hid his face behind his hand. When he looked up again, the grey of early twilight had descended on the street. It was one of those rare moments in which he could imagine himself quite apart from his own body, suspended above the city and watching it, with all his great quantity of pompous affection, as it ticked itself into night like a confused clock – or, perhaps, one of those moments (even rarer) in which he was so thoroughly bound to everyone around him, as though threaded man to man by the needle of the wind, that he felt they were all turning together toward the night like a ship running off course. He was outside himself; he was in something else. He was drunk.

He leaned against the parapet to let the feeling pass, and his eyes were drawn to the only other creature that stood stopped against the swollen confusion of the crowded, chilly evening. A horse across the street with a simple cart – hardly more than a few poles roped together – hitched too close behind was shifting its weight anxiously. Its eyes were starting toward and away from its master, who stood to the side in conversation, one hand tangled absently in the reins. What was frightening the animal Grantaire couldn't say, but he saw with perfect clarity that at any fast-approaching moment it would rear or kick or thrash and its clumsy cargo of boxes and barrels would lurch and tumble onto the men and women hurrying by.

But he stood quietly, fingers fretting at the loose threads in the pockets of his coat. He said nothing and warned no one as the crowd shouldered past, inches from disaster. A man with his nose in a book; a woman with an overlarge basket; an elderly person trailing a chain of children; Enjolras, his head down against the wind, seeking a way through the multitude. Grantaire's heart labored in his chest for each of them, pushing cold fear through him and a pressing, pulsing knowledge that he should call out – but he was silent. He watched, stricken with an unfamiliar, dry-mouthed timidity, the strange and petrifying sensation that he was looking into a world to which he did not belong. The moment rattled back and forth like a tree torn in a storm, snapping in every direction as he willed it not to fall.

The horse threw its head to one side – and was calm. The crowd moved on like the river beside it, unstoppable. Enjolras rounded the corner without looking up. The wind swept through the space where he had been.

Grantaire straightened, and, after a breathless moment, followed him. The evening shadows deepened and dulled as he walked, pursued by a haunting guilt that was laden with images of blood, of chaos, of crushed bodies, all smothered in the silence he had chosen.

+++

It was a short walk to the Musain's back entrance. Grantaire meandered as much as possible on his way, unwilling to face Enjolras while he was quite so discomposed. He loitered on corners, shuffled slowly past windows, introduced himself with impeccable gallantry and galling self-flattery to any woman who would entertain his attentions for more than ten seconds. He stopped with the intention of dallying over a bottle of wine in an ugly little wineshop near the Mathurins, and although his stunned nerves caused him to drink more quickly than he meant to, by the time he reached the dregs the wine had set him right again. He saw with the fresh, relieved lucidity of the waking dreamer the ridiculousness of his anxiety. He had surely imagined the whole thing – some sort of momentary upset, the cognitive equivalent of finding a bone in the fish, had caused him to turn the placement of a hoof into a mortal peril. How foolish it would have been to make a fuss about it!

Comforted, he completed his journey to the Musain, where the lingering dissatisfaction at the periphery of his mind - _you saw what you saw, and you said nothing_ \- was obliterated by the usual wall of noise. In most instances a fixture from the early afternoon – meeting or no meeting – Grantaire today was late. His tardiness was not remarked upon. He shuffled through the conversations and the jumble of legs, coats, and books to a chair in the corner farthest from the door. 

From here he could see Enjolras, quite across the room, his profile thrown into shadow by the fire leaping in the grate behind him. Grantaire kept a curious eye on him, reassuring himself with every passing moment that all was as it should be, letting the imagined carnage burn away as the firelight left grey absences across his vision. Enjolras' mouth moved silently, his words lost somewhere in the din between them.

He procured a bottle. He settled in. He found near-contentment in another glass or two, dulling away the rough angles of his memory. When Prouvaire dropped himself into the adjacent seat with a sheaf of papers and a joyfully tipsy glow, Grantaire found he could smile very freely.

Prouvaire handed him a few pages with exaggerated care. "You will appreciate these."

"Such confidence." He held the pile of sketches well above the discreditable surface of the table as he flipped through them, his hands steadier than his eyes. They were, in fact, worthy of some appreciation – well-composed and thoughtful, the lines slow and heavy but sure, in a care-free sort of way. The subject matter was strange, disconnected – a wheel, a broken pot, a series of drapes moving in an impossible wind, a face rendered from such a low angle as to be nearly unrecognizable – but not boring, for all that. "Not yours."

"No. I looked for you earlier – you've slept in miserably."

"That's nice. You think a great deal of me." He handed the pages back, accepted a few more. "I have been walking, I'll have you know – covered every corner from here to the Boulevard de l'Hôpital three times if I did it once. I feel something coming on, and I wanted to outrun it. Sleep would have been a more intelligent choice, but I can't sit around in the miasma waiting to be seized. These are charming – gratuitously strange. Not at all precious."

A squall of sentiment loomed, threatening, on the horizon of Prouvaire's face. "They are." He drew out a ghostly representation of an empty coat. "'Charming' is a small word to use, but I know you mean better. There's not a hint of artifice, he hasn't got a single –"

"Oh," Grantaire sighed explosively, tipping himself out another glass, ensuring it splashed only modestly. "Don't."

Prouvaire, always happy enough to be diverted, smiled mildly at Grantaire's dwindling bottle. "Don't what?"

"Don't tell me a thing about him. What is it with your insistence on prying into the filthy details of –"

"A passing acquaintance hardly sinks to the level of filthy –"

"Of course it does. You have to choose – between an acquaintance and appreciation. There's nothing worse than knowing the artist _passing_ well. If you're going to know him at all – not recommended, but for you I make an exception – it had better be thoroughly, thoroughly. What could be worse than seeing an otherwise decent painting and thinking about how the artist always has crumbs in his collar? How can you read anything that purports to any sort of grandeur and at the same time know that the fellow who wrote it has a laugh like a bad hinge? It's impossible. Better to admire in ignorance. Better to preserve whatever small purity the work itself can offer."

"I had no idea," Prouvaire said, gingerly transporting Grantaire's glass across the table and helping himself after giving it a dubious look, "that you were so devoted to purity."

"Of course I'm not. How can I devote myself to something that doesn't exist? I only said it was better. We're operating entirely theoretically. That glass is filthy."

"Shamefully. You're wrong, you know – any amount of knowledge can only heighten appreciation. Flaws speak as deeply as do virtues."

"What rubbish. If I want flaws, I'll look in a mirror."

"Is it tiring, keeping to the shallows? You must have to tread water so furiously to keep from sinking. A man like you won't float for half a minute on his back."

Grantaire reclaimed his wine. "If you're going to drink it all, get your own." He took the rest of the sketches when they were offered. "I never learned to swim." 

He passed the evening with those drawings; then, when Prouvaire left, in dissecting and excoriating an article Courfeyrac had been gently plucking apart; and then, when he was drunk past speaking, submerged in himself and stewing in nothing but his own bleak premonitions, he turned his eyes to Enjolras, whose face came slowly into focus as the fire behind him cooled and died away.

+++

To dream at all was unusual; after the amount he'd drunk, it was very rare indeed. But that night his dreams were vivid, wild, strangely indelible. Every image remained as though it had been captured on paper. Horses were stabled in his mother's parlor – he stepped outside into a street that was not (but was) his home in Paris – he ran painfully, impossibly slowly across a bridgeless Seine and wound up somehow in the Champ de Mars, which was playing host to hundreds of people practicing at _canne de combat_. They were stripped to the waist, men and women alike, and they were red and bruised. Some flew through the air, some held actual swords, all were fighting fiercely. The only sound was the stamp of feet in the grass, the rush of breath, and the push of the wind through the peaceful trees. Enjolras was expertly evading the attacks of a man whose face kept slipping from Grantaire's mind like water off a window. Again and again, the man came within inches of landing a blow, and Enjolas, ducking, spinning aside, leaping, brought himself clear. He was spotless, untouched, marred only by sweat. Grantaire felt an intense desire to turn away cramping his stomach like a vice, but then Enjolras' stick swept against the man's side – a hit – and the man fell, and Grantaire was compelled to snatch up his weapon, and he stood half-naked before Enjolras, petrified, exhilarated. 

The thought of striking him produced in him an intense nausea, almost unbearable. And yet he was tempted. There was nothing he desired more, he realized, than to leave a mark on that flawless skin. It was forbidden. Who had forbidden it? He had forbidden himself. What sacrilege – 

Enjolras assumed a stance – improper stance, but here the rules were changed – and struck; Grantaire parried and parried and parried, letting himself be forced back and around their little piece of ground so many times he began to feel dizzy, lightheaded. Time and again he saw an opening, a moment where he might lash out and score a point, and held back as he knew he should. But soon the hunger was too great to resist – he could _taste_ the impact on the back of his tongue, at once bitter and sweet – and he brought his stick soaring down against Enjolras' ribs beneath his upraised arm. Enjolras stumbled to the side. His stick fell to the grass. _You have a funny way of playing_ , he said, _baiting more than fighting. Quite like you, I suppose._

 _I enjoy hewing to principle, from time to time,_ , Grantaire replied, his desire utterly shattered by the bright red welt rising along Enjolras' side. He could feel it in his own skin, burning like an agony of shame, and he turned away and was promptly sick over the side of his bed.

+++

When he woke again it was in the dark of night, not morning. He sat up, hunched under the chill wracking his body. He felt half as though he were still in a dream. The tension of it clung to him in defiance of the laws of waking reason. Sick with guilt and fear - _fever_ occurred to him only vaguely – he stood and dressed himself with unsteady hands and, shoulders turned tightly in against the shuddering cold, he left. After fumbling unsuccessfully with his lock for perhaps half a minute he gave it up. There was very little of value in his room, and what's more everyone knew it. (He had forgotten his watch, but rifling through his drawers would hardly be worth such a meagre haul.)

To walk to the Musain typically took him two minutes; but he had no sense of time as he slapped his hand against the door to its back room and found it shut. He might have arrived all at once, or he might have wandered for a year. There was no light. There was no sound. For a moment he wavered on the step gripped in cold panic – the city was desolate and he was alone and the faces of the buildings contorted with decay – but the lights from the Place Saint-Michel lay in a hazy drift just around the corner, and so he passed that way, and soon his feet took him on their other best-loved path.

Had his body not known the way, he might never have arrived – but this was true of a great deal of his night-time excursions, and he was quite practiced at taking himself from place to place on only the barest of instinct. He was drawn across the Pont Saint-Michel, across the Pont au Change, and up into the dark web of towering streets that surrounded the Corinthe. They were largely empty. He began to doubt whether he would find anyone, and had the presence of mind to wonder, for a moment, why he was out at all; but his pleasure at seeing a lamp in the right window and smoke rising from the right chimney overpowered his uneasiness, leaving him with the very simple urge to find somewhere to sit and stay.

Before he could cross the street, however, Enjolras himself stepped out the door and into a weak pool of lamplight. Grantaire stopped to let pass a phantom wave of nausea, to clutch his coat all the more tightly around himself, and to ponder briefly the ridiculousness of his situation. This was not a dream. Enjolras was upright, unhurt. Why had he come here? To check up on him? To apologize? Certainly not to eat, the thought threatened to send him doubling over again –

"Grantaire." Enjolras was beside him. His brow was creased ever so slightly in flat disapproval. "I said –"

"I'm late." Not surprising in and of itself, but he was momentarily pleased that he had remembered there was something to be late for in the first place. 

"Decidedly. You might as well not have come." 

"Familiar refrain. Listen – I've been indisposed." Enjolras was walking, making his brisk way through those impossible streets, and Grantaire went along, matching him pace for pace at great cost to his complaining legs and back.

"You're drunk."

"I'm not."

Perhaps there was something convincing, for once, in his voice or his posture, or perhaps the light in the street was just enough to reveal his miserable pallor; at any rate, Enjolras stopped and peered at him more closely – and raised his hand to press the back of his fingers against Grantaire's face, a liberty he found rather more insulting than touching, truth be told. Enjolras hissed quietly and drew his hand back. "Not drunk – addled, though, coming here. What are you thinking? Go home."

"I came to see you." That was the truth, even if he couldn't have said what lay behind it. There was no one else he'd hoped to find.

"I'm not a doctor."

"No – I'm well enough, you know." Not so well that he would start walking again unless he was made to, of course. He leaned gratefully against a scaling cornerstone. "A touch of fever can try its chances and lay me on my back, but it'll find me in my natural habitat, and I don't think much of its prospects –"

"You've found me," Enjolras interrupted, with emphasis. "What do you want to say?"

"I don't know, only –" Here Enjolras began to walk again, and once more Grantaire straightened and followed, conscious suddenly of the dark and omnipresent alleys, the apparent infinite around them, the unending potential for the stuff of dreams to come flying out at him again from every blind window and every gaping side street. "Only that you're in danger." It seemed so perfectly obvious in this place, which had in the space of a few minutes come to seem one of the most sinister he'd ever seen, that the words came out rather casually – as though Enjolras was sure to have noticed for himself.

Enjolras' pace slowed. "Danger," he repeated, a note of scepticism in his voice – an irony worth remarking upon later – but he met Grantaire's eyes again, at least, his attention secured. "What danger is that?"

"You don't see it?" How could he then articulate it? What felt to him like a living, breathing thing occupying the city, some carnivorous mist that manifested itself in a horse's eye or the spectre of a flowering bruise or the glint of the moon off the wet leaves collected in the gutter in which he was suddenly walking – "Everything is a danger to you – everywhere – you walk down the street and only by the luckiest chance do you make it out alive, you bare yourself needlessly to injury, to _eyes_ ; that you shouldn't do, you know. A man can change something just by watching it, just by looking too closely. There's the danger. _What danger_ , you ask, like an untroubled boy, but what danger _isn't_ there, when a careless second glance can conjure up in a charming picture a flaw one was too stupid to see on the –"

"Grantaire." Enjolras' hand was heavy and intolerably hot on his shoulder. Grantaire found himself sitting on a stair. "You're mad with fever, and talking nonsense. You need –"

"No. You ought to listen to me, there's no one else who'll tell you. No one else has seen it. There's a danger – I'm a danger to you." There – there, that had touched it. He struggled to chase after that fleeting idea. "I'm awfully dangerous. You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I could destroy you with a look."

"Tell me what you mean." Enjolras had never sounded quite so patient, and Grantaire had never felt so very drawn to the ground beneath him; Enjolras' arm sliding behind his shoulders was on a hopeless errand, he was sure. Grantaire's limbs felt as though they were made of stone, and were appropriately unresponsive.

His mind was flying, though, speeding out ahead. "Oh – no." Logic dictated that he couldn't possibly tell him. That was the entire point. "No, I really couldn't." Enjolras was so nearly perfect; to inform him of the possibility that his perfection might be ruined by a close inspection was to begin the very decay he sought to avoid; he mustn't say anything. On no account must he say it. Silence had come so easily to him yesterday in its unwelcome, cowardly form – he could manage as much now. "No." Silence. "No, I love you too dearly." He would hold his tongue. He would say nothing.

"Love is not a danger."

"Oh, what a thing to say. Who's mad now?"

"Love is the end of all we strive for." Enjolras' words fell in time with his footfalls, and Grantaire felt himself in danger of falling asleep to them. "It is supreme, ultimate – the best part of faith. That you should fail to understand it is hardly a surprise."

The hot pain of that blow in the Champ de Mars coursed up Grantaire's throat. He tugged at his collar and wrenched his neck to the side and noticed with some dim surprise that they were passing over the river. "You wrong me hideously."

"If so, it's only based on your own words and actions. You choose what others can see – they judge accordingly."

"Now you give me entirely too much credit."

Enjolras' mouth tightened slightly and Grantaire regretted his answer for the half a moment it took him to turn his attention back to putting one foot in front of the other. Luckily, he hadn't the energy to say any more, and his silence kept itself without his assistance. When they came near the Musain Enjolras asked him his address, and that was all he could give him. He hardly noticed the stony tutting of the landlady, the heaving up the two flights of stairs; he registered a brief pang of shame as they finally crossed his private threshold, because the room really was quite foul, but there was nothing for that. Only lying in his own bed again did he come to himself sufficiently to begin to question what he'd done. There was a dip in the mattress near his feet – Enjolras, bravely hunting for a clean rag, perhaps in vain hope of finding some decent water to soak it in.

"Words and actions," Grantaire said, angling his chin toward the ceiling. "I've said too much and done more than I should have." Fearful somehow of allowing those words to carry any weight, he added by way of explanation: "My head is splitting."

"You always say too much." There was a gentle splashing sound. "And walking quite so far to warn me about ghosts is absolutely more than you should have attempted, even had you been healthy."

"So – in your book, then, I've shown my hand." He shut his eyes. Enjolras was too close; this attention, this scrutiny brought back the pulsing fear that had troubled him for days, even as it assuaged something else in him whose name escaped him. He was torn between hot and cold and peace and apprehension. At any moment he might break in two. "Words and actions. What's your judgement, then? You have all you need." He was prattling, anything to keep from the incomprehensible jumble of his own mind. If nothing else, Enjolras provided the reassurance he required to know that this was not another nightmare.

Something cool and light settled onto his forehead. "That some things bear closer inspection, despite your insistences to the contrary." Fingers slipped into his hair, only for a moment. The sensation grounded him to his body, pulled him ever so slightly back together. "That you wrong yourself – if not quite hideously. Ask again when you're not raving, and I'll tell you."

Grantaire reached up with more strength than he'd have credited himself with a moment before, and gripped the wrist that rested against his temple. "I am not raving."

"Not quite, perhaps. Let me open a window."

The wrist disappeared; a breeze slipped in, and Grantaire fell in and out of a black, empty sleep, anchored to the weight at the end of his bed. When he woke in the morning, some of the fog had lifted.


End file.
